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[Region 1][Map 07][Location 01] Fentor Cross Area

Getting a bigger picture on Fentor Cross.

Fentor Cross is the crossing point between the two Fentor Hills (West and East). Around the town are three forts and as such it is well protected and combined, it has the largest garrison of all the places in the fenlands.

The three forts are Westside, Eastside and Thrubview. The large town in the middle has a large spiked palisade containing all of the houses. It is the melting pot of the area full of merchants and travelers.

This map is still 125mi across so its still too large to map at town level.

I'm planning to get the first stab at the maps as just outlines. I will try to get the roads, the palisade walls and the outer bit done and provide a blank space in case anyone wants to start a city map. If I can do the outer and large bits then it should line up with the area map. I will try to do this for some of the larger places in the Thrubmorton region.

Yeah I am having some great fun. This is one of the first times that GTS has been used to generate some deep terrain stuff. I'm trying out all sorts of stuff here.

This is my Dragon Flight prog. Its a freebie but it does not come with the height map and color map for this. But I have uploaded the app and the height maps for it here. Its 10Mb so be easy on the download - my poor web server (I'll prob take it down in a week or so to stop killing it).

Run DF, click past the help dialog. Now press 'P' for about 3 seconds. Press 'H' four times. Maximize it and press '6'. Enjoy (Tell me if it works alright. Its the new V1.05 released yesterday)

I am pretty happy with the erosion and its very good in a few certain ways but in general it's not the best out there. Theres some really good mountain erosion from WorldMachine - that one is particularly impressive in that department.

I was a little lazy with the raindrops thing. I added a little noise and upscaled it. I should have added it progressively as it upscaled so that it generated more even distribution of frequencies. If I had let it erode more then it would have made it look better but it would probably make the terrain more different to the backdrop its supposed to be sitting on so I didn't.

In terms of flooding I can see where your coming from. The terrain is supposed to be Karst (limestone) so that there is very little surface water on the upper hills and drainage is very good. The water flows through cave systems carving out large caverns until they collapse and then grass over so thats what its supposed to be. My app does not do any kind of rock type processing and definitely no cave collapsing stuff so I have to live with what it produces. So the look of the map is that of hard impermeable stone eroded away. I ran it with water for a while then turned up the permeability real high. Theres the odd area with some spots of water and this could be true to real but its not likely to be all that drinkable.

I think from an RPG point of view the villages would have a lack of water and would probably have to collect it. Its highly likely though that there would be a lot of springs all around the base of the hills. Some of the points on the map might be able to collect water but I think that its the major thing that would be different from usual villages.

Hmm... No actually !
The numbers 1-8 perform changes in the resolutions to fixed amounts. It might take a second or two to generate it. You could tell whether the keys are working at all by using the '1' and '2' keys because they should be much faster but lower res. The res is displayed at the top title bar.

You can press 'T' and 'Y' to go up down in res too but its best if you go with a multiple of the native height map res. The one provided is 1024 height with 2048 color.

Some cards barf when going too big tho. Thats the GL driver throwing in the towel for trying to allocate too much memory. Some ATI cards start rendering the scene half white or all white even with a color.bmp file. From experience, only nVidia cards seem to get it right but my testing was a long time ago and I expect things have changed.

On my machine with a 7600GS it will do the 2048 but you can't have any other GL apps running at the same time. I have tested on a lower spec ATI card at lower res and its alright too.

Anyway, if pressing the '1' & '2' keys change res, all I can suggest is to run up the task manager and see if after pressing the '6' key it does a lot of processing and when that finishes does the title bar change to 1024 res.

The image wont change, just the quality of the height terrain.

Edit -- actually maybe whats happening is that 1024 is too much for your card and its failing one of the calls to generate and display it. I am using a pretty advanced feature of storing the entire terrain on the graphics card so that its much faster. You do need a big card for bigger res. Go up the scale and see if it stops working after a few. 512 square ought to be fine tho and thats seriously better than the 100 its starts up in.